What a long strange trip it’s been. I feel I’m on the precipice
of relief. Like the nail that’s been pounding away at my head needs one last
good slug and I’ll go down. Maybe I can meander through a retrospective and
piece the story together of how I got here.
I never knew any better. I think that’s a fairly broad yet understanding position you can attribute to someone, especially when they’re growing up. You just don’t know any better. You follow rules because they are there, or you’ll get hit, or you’ll get grounded. If your authority figure is particularly malicious, perhaps you’ll start to learn all sorts of bonus painful cause and effect lessons that serve to confuse you later in life. Instilled in you is some level of structure. If you’re lucky it’s healthy and informed. If you’re not, it’s a simple permutation of “try it, get fucked.”
As a child I didn’t know to what degree anything was a problem. I heard stories of my aunt getting beaten by her husband, but no one beat him up, and he still went to shake my hand at Thanksgiving without people making a fuss. You can form any number of childish conceptions about how badly you hate your parents for one reason or another, but 20 years later when your dad says, “Some people just should not have children, and your mom is one of them,” you begin to think you had pretty good instincts.
Your relationship to your parents can change or evolve over time. The entirety of that time, you can have no real understanding or basis for why you’re feeling or thinking one way over another. The extreme anger I held for my mom is now waterfalls of pity. Whatever I was made to believe about love for your parents or family broke into many different pieces informed by many different and contradictory stories of love. You’re just supposed to love them right? It’s that simple. Or it can be. Or it should be. Or what’s happening if you can’t? I don’t know any better.
Get into any relationship it’s the same thing. You don’t know how the other person or people will feel later. You were doing the best you could with your hopes and prayers. You believe because what else is there? You’re not trying to lie. You don’t mean to hurt anyone. But you didn’t know any better. You didn’t know how to cope or accept. You didn’t know how to phrase things or cultivate the patience. You didn’t know that a 3 minute walk around the block slows your heart and helps center you. You didn’t know what you even wanted out of it to begin with.
When you’re immersed in life it’s an obliteration event. You absolve yourself of otherwise intrusive thoughts with the day’s dealings or the routine. You bounce between impressions from hundreds of friends or acquaintances. You’re excited to show off what you’ve accomplished or is happening to you. You swoon over the perfect sunset that just seems to frame itself with your camera in mind. It’s the celebration at the top of an academic or professional mountain. It’s freedom. It’s boundless expression and garnering of attention.
And perhaps for a child, that’s precisely what we want. They’ve got time to know better. It’ll sink in soon enough. Let them play.
How do you start to know better? When do the decisions start feeling like yours and not incidental ones to stay afloat through crashing waves? For me, it was simply starting to write. I didn’t only have to be a ball of stress and questions. I could reach out and hunt for perspectives. I got random encouragement. I got people talking. When I said something particularly stupid, I had to try and defend it or modify or qualify it. It took a lot of work and time. It never got perfect.
In those periods of conversation and engagement, I thought I was learning something better. I thought I was picking up that many peoples’ minds are going as often as mine is. They share the same concerns. They have a hard time explaining them. Resolutions can be met when two or more people with honest perspectives pursue the dirt of whatever is being discussed. It wasn’t a plea. It wasn’t slinging baseless accusations. No one was going to get hurt.
Then you introduce silence. People “grow up” and get “conservative.” They don’t want to make the same mistakes of their youth from talking too quick or especially making it public. As okay as it is for an impassioned teenage idiot to carry on about their first philosopher is how okay it becomes to basically never say anything regarding life as you get older. I’d consider both problematic, but the older person should know better. Or so I hope to discover.
At each layer where information is trying to be transferred there’s something of a battleground. You can refer to it superficially, “liberal verses conservative,” or egotistically, “rednecks verses academics,” or insecurely, “I actually think verses I want them to think.” And it’s not like we insist on only discussing things in one proper way. I’m sure I routinely switch tenses when I write because I’m trying to write as I think or speak, neither of which solidly reside in a strict relationship to a point in time. I start to ask myself, is there a “better?”
Am I better writer than when I started? I break things into paragraphs, which at least makes it easier for me to read. I say “fuck” considerably less often, but that could speak to personal preference. How would I know? It was only ever supposed to help me get rid of headaches. As long as it keeps doing that, it’s as good as it can ever get. It’s supposed to give me something to consider when I can’t pin down what I’m trying to consider. It is still doing that, so it’s still as good as it ever was.
“It’s just insecurity,” as internet doctors proclaim. I need to be loved! But only managed to pick the most grating and encumbered way and can’t appreciate my folly! “You just want attention,” those egging on the encouragement charge. Yes, please face this block of words, tell me to die, and then I win! They looked! They looked! “You’re not a secret genius,” as little do they know the whole point was to coax that sentiment out of them the whole time! 12 years and finally someone fell for my trap!
I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do in trying to understand things. I don’t know what understanding looks like without a ton of words. Without being exhausted of my questions or lines of reasoning, where am I going? What else would my words or feelings be in service to? Maybe it’s right here, when you ask yourself why the fuck you’re even bothering are you allowed to discover “better.”
I want the same peace for you that I either seek or find in my mind. I know I feel better without a slurry of headache inducing questions and anger. I don’t like to feel small. I don’t like being called “crazy” or “in need of a therapist” or “rambling” as if my brain has 50 different words I’d rather use in place of this sentence, and I’m just choosing to pick ones you think are totally shit. The peace of mind I achieve from attempting to explain myself is real. It’s as real as the boundless hatred I experience for bothering.
And it’s better. It’s better to give yourself time to not only take in information, but mash it up and see if you can spit it out in a way that helps you build. It’s better to have my struggles with free time than it is to adopt the ones handed down from systems of greed, consumption, and exploitation. Of course no one remains perfectly clean or perfectly free, but that’s not the point. I choose TV, reading, sporadic exercise, entrepreneurship, and wandering about the world and my mind every day because it’s better.
I can only speculate what you think is better. I can only draw from conversations we used to have. I can only cross my fingers that whatever sacrifices you make in service to your lives feel as “duh” as mine do for me. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t expect you to know what else to do. It’s not like you read these or we talk. It’s not like I ever set out for them to mean anything to anyone but me in the first place.
What I do know, is that I’m sick of the fucking hatred. I’m sick of the judgment. I’m sick of the imagination that can only be used to conjure the worst ideas you’ve ever had about someone. I know I’m better because my approach to fear and anger will consistently be this. I could “lose it” all day here and all you’ll get is more words. I can talk myself through the infinite insecurities that are projected onto me. I don’t ignore what you say and retort with empty things hoping to make you feel bad. I don’t tell you to die. I don’t reimagine and literally make things up to make you sound worse than I promise you already do.
Be the change you want to see. Every hurt feeling I want a trail of pages until it’s mended. Every flirtation with jumping over the edge I want a cushion of crumpled paper to catch you. Every baseless accusation I want met with analogy after analogy that ridicules and undermines. I want evidence of thought. I want patience. I want “tl:dr” to stick its head up its ass.
People that don’t know how to get better can’t see me. These words aren’t here. There is no guiding ethic or purpose to what I’m doing that isn’t a manifestation of their worst nightmares about me. I get that, and certainly don’t enjoy that. I hope to one day make peace with it.
I never knew any better. I think that’s a fairly broad yet understanding position you can attribute to someone, especially when they’re growing up. You just don’t know any better. You follow rules because they are there, or you’ll get hit, or you’ll get grounded. If your authority figure is particularly malicious, perhaps you’ll start to learn all sorts of bonus painful cause and effect lessons that serve to confuse you later in life. Instilled in you is some level of structure. If you’re lucky it’s healthy and informed. If you’re not, it’s a simple permutation of “try it, get fucked.”
As a child I didn’t know to what degree anything was a problem. I heard stories of my aunt getting beaten by her husband, but no one beat him up, and he still went to shake my hand at Thanksgiving without people making a fuss. You can form any number of childish conceptions about how badly you hate your parents for one reason or another, but 20 years later when your dad says, “Some people just should not have children, and your mom is one of them,” you begin to think you had pretty good instincts.
Your relationship to your parents can change or evolve over time. The entirety of that time, you can have no real understanding or basis for why you’re feeling or thinking one way over another. The extreme anger I held for my mom is now waterfalls of pity. Whatever I was made to believe about love for your parents or family broke into many different pieces informed by many different and contradictory stories of love. You’re just supposed to love them right? It’s that simple. Or it can be. Or it should be. Or what’s happening if you can’t? I don’t know any better.
Get into any relationship it’s the same thing. You don’t know how the other person or people will feel later. You were doing the best you could with your hopes and prayers. You believe because what else is there? You’re not trying to lie. You don’t mean to hurt anyone. But you didn’t know any better. You didn’t know how to cope or accept. You didn’t know how to phrase things or cultivate the patience. You didn’t know that a 3 minute walk around the block slows your heart and helps center you. You didn’t know what you even wanted out of it to begin with.
When you’re immersed in life it’s an obliteration event. You absolve yourself of otherwise intrusive thoughts with the day’s dealings or the routine. You bounce between impressions from hundreds of friends or acquaintances. You’re excited to show off what you’ve accomplished or is happening to you. You swoon over the perfect sunset that just seems to frame itself with your camera in mind. It’s the celebration at the top of an academic or professional mountain. It’s freedom. It’s boundless expression and garnering of attention.
And perhaps for a child, that’s precisely what we want. They’ve got time to know better. It’ll sink in soon enough. Let them play.
How do you start to know better? When do the decisions start feeling like yours and not incidental ones to stay afloat through crashing waves? For me, it was simply starting to write. I didn’t only have to be a ball of stress and questions. I could reach out and hunt for perspectives. I got random encouragement. I got people talking. When I said something particularly stupid, I had to try and defend it or modify or qualify it. It took a lot of work and time. It never got perfect.
In those periods of conversation and engagement, I thought I was learning something better. I thought I was picking up that many peoples’ minds are going as often as mine is. They share the same concerns. They have a hard time explaining them. Resolutions can be met when two or more people with honest perspectives pursue the dirt of whatever is being discussed. It wasn’t a plea. It wasn’t slinging baseless accusations. No one was going to get hurt.
Then you introduce silence. People “grow up” and get “conservative.” They don’t want to make the same mistakes of their youth from talking too quick or especially making it public. As okay as it is for an impassioned teenage idiot to carry on about their first philosopher is how okay it becomes to basically never say anything regarding life as you get older. I’d consider both problematic, but the older person should know better. Or so I hope to discover.
At each layer where information is trying to be transferred there’s something of a battleground. You can refer to it superficially, “liberal verses conservative,” or egotistically, “rednecks verses academics,” or insecurely, “I actually think verses I want them to think.” And it’s not like we insist on only discussing things in one proper way. I’m sure I routinely switch tenses when I write because I’m trying to write as I think or speak, neither of which solidly reside in a strict relationship to a point in time. I start to ask myself, is there a “better?”
Am I better writer than when I started? I break things into paragraphs, which at least makes it easier for me to read. I say “fuck” considerably less often, but that could speak to personal preference. How would I know? It was only ever supposed to help me get rid of headaches. As long as it keeps doing that, it’s as good as it can ever get. It’s supposed to give me something to consider when I can’t pin down what I’m trying to consider. It is still doing that, so it’s still as good as it ever was.
“It’s just insecurity,” as internet doctors proclaim. I need to be loved! But only managed to pick the most grating and encumbered way and can’t appreciate my folly! “You just want attention,” those egging on the encouragement charge. Yes, please face this block of words, tell me to die, and then I win! They looked! They looked! “You’re not a secret genius,” as little do they know the whole point was to coax that sentiment out of them the whole time! 12 years and finally someone fell for my trap!
I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do in trying to understand things. I don’t know what understanding looks like without a ton of words. Without being exhausted of my questions or lines of reasoning, where am I going? What else would my words or feelings be in service to? Maybe it’s right here, when you ask yourself why the fuck you’re even bothering are you allowed to discover “better.”
I want the same peace for you that I either seek or find in my mind. I know I feel better without a slurry of headache inducing questions and anger. I don’t like to feel small. I don’t like being called “crazy” or “in need of a therapist” or “rambling” as if my brain has 50 different words I’d rather use in place of this sentence, and I’m just choosing to pick ones you think are totally shit. The peace of mind I achieve from attempting to explain myself is real. It’s as real as the boundless hatred I experience for bothering.
And it’s better. It’s better to give yourself time to not only take in information, but mash it up and see if you can spit it out in a way that helps you build. It’s better to have my struggles with free time than it is to adopt the ones handed down from systems of greed, consumption, and exploitation. Of course no one remains perfectly clean or perfectly free, but that’s not the point. I choose TV, reading, sporadic exercise, entrepreneurship, and wandering about the world and my mind every day because it’s better.
I can only speculate what you think is better. I can only draw from conversations we used to have. I can only cross my fingers that whatever sacrifices you make in service to your lives feel as “duh” as mine do for me. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t expect you to know what else to do. It’s not like you read these or we talk. It’s not like I ever set out for them to mean anything to anyone but me in the first place.
What I do know, is that I’m sick of the fucking hatred. I’m sick of the judgment. I’m sick of the imagination that can only be used to conjure the worst ideas you’ve ever had about someone. I know I’m better because my approach to fear and anger will consistently be this. I could “lose it” all day here and all you’ll get is more words. I can talk myself through the infinite insecurities that are projected onto me. I don’t ignore what you say and retort with empty things hoping to make you feel bad. I don’t tell you to die. I don’t reimagine and literally make things up to make you sound worse than I promise you already do.
Be the change you want to see. Every hurt feeling I want a trail of pages until it’s mended. Every flirtation with jumping over the edge I want a cushion of crumpled paper to catch you. Every baseless accusation I want met with analogy after analogy that ridicules and undermines. I want evidence of thought. I want patience. I want “tl:dr” to stick its head up its ass.
People that don’t know how to get better can’t see me. These words aren’t here. There is no guiding ethic or purpose to what I’m doing that isn’t a manifestation of their worst nightmares about me. I get that, and certainly don’t enjoy that. I hope to one day make peace with it.
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